DROP DEAD GORGEOUS

Communing with the deceased on the CBS hit "GHOST WHISPERER" has breathed a new life into the career of Jennifer Love Hewitt. As she prepares for the show's second season, the veteran singer-actress-producer reflects on her professional ambitions, sticks up for Lindsay Lohan and shoots down Wilmer Valderrama's boasts about their alleged intimacy. An 8 out of 10? HA!......

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Images by FlorianSchneiderPhoto.com

Styling by Edgar Revilla - CrystalAgency.com

Make-Up by Sabrina Bedrani using Giorgio Armani/AvantGroupe.com

Hair by Davy Newkirk for Redken at CelestineAgency.com

It might feel strange these days to be Jennifer Love Hewitt these days. After all, on CBS' sentimental supernatural favorite "GHOST WHISPERER," about to enter its second season, she plays a newlywed with a gist for assisting the dearly departed in getting on with their afterlives---a bit like real life medium James Van Praagh, who inspired and co-executive produces the show, only way prettier and endowed with serious curves.

The sometimes dark, almost always sentimental role isn't the sort of thing you might expect the fizzy and upbeat Hewitt to be playing if you followed her early career. After all, the young singer-actress, who was born in Waco, Texas, and has been performing since she was three, launched a thousand teen fantasies in the 90's during her four year run as Scott Wolf's soulful and shapely girlfriend on the Fox television series "Party of Five," on which her whole sexiness made her a star.

That TV success, followed by starring roles in movies like the two "I Know What You Did Last Summer" smashes, the teen romp "Can't Hardly Wait," the mom-daughter con-women comedy "Heartbreakers" and the lead role of a Hollywood icon in the telefilm "The Audrey Hepburn Story," cemented Hewitt's fame, made her a fixture on the covers of glossy magazines and landed her endorsement gigs as a spokesperson for such products as Nokia. Not only she define "It" girl, but she also became a kind of role model for "nice." She famously lived with her mother and, unlike some of her contemporaries, never acquired any sort of public reputation for partying, nastiness or hooking up with the wrong sort of guy.

Meanwhile, a wave washed in a new pack of "it" girls with names like Reese, Lindsay and Scarlett, just as Hewitt who seemed ideally cast as unattainable prom queens and prettiest girls on campus, began to pursue more mature roles. Complications ensued as she sought to expand her range opposite Sir Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin in the 2001 drama "The Devil & Daniel Webster"---guess which one she played. The ill-fated film got tied up in litigation for years, and remains mostly unseen. Meanwhile, her teaming with Jackie Chan in the 2002 action comedy "The Tuxedo" won a few fans and sold a few tickets, and a string of subsequent movies barely generated a ripple.

Even so, she stayed in the news, her name constantly appearing in men's magazines on lists of the world's sexiest women and her romantic life linked with such names as singer-songwriter John Mayer. She attempted to return to TV with "In The Game," a TV project she co-created and starred in as a single mom. Filmed twice in 2004 and 2005, with Hewitt heading different casts, the pilot episode never made it to series.

Ivory one shoulder long dress by Moschino.

Today, however, at 27, Hewitt appears to have found her footing again. She is the star of a success TV series, plans to act in a number of movie and TV projects she is developing through her production company and, like it or not, has found herself in the news lately, courtesy of a couple of rumored boyfriends who could probably use a lesson in discretion, and buzz that she might pose provocatively for Playboy.

Sleek and glowing in a summery green plaid skirt and top that reveal subtle glimpse of the contours that helped make her famous, Hewitt looks like a young woman in command of her destiny again. Making many a head swivel as she slips into a tucked away alcove of one of her favorite Riverside Drive's restaurants, a stone's throw from the Universal lot where she's filming "GHOST WHISPERER," she chats a mile a minute about having settled back into the TV series grove.

Copper and Bronze French Imported lace halter dress with crystal beaded trim by Mark Zunino.

"Doing television has a lot of goods and bads, like anything," she says. "The bad is only that there's very little personal time and not so much sleep; the good being that I get to go home every night and sleep in my own bed. The people I work with are really decent, good and loving, so they're people you really want to go to work with every day. We've also been really, really lucky because in this day and age where the networks don't give anything a chance, CBS loves us, takes care of us and allows us to grow every week. Toward the end of our first season, the crew sort of found their pace and we all pretty much knew we wanted to do, and where we wanted to go with the characters."

Starring on a show set in the world of unquiet souls and unresolved issues can bring on some interesting and, at times, unsettling experiences. "Death was always something that I was really afraid of---a lot," she says, mentioning the lost of her two grandfathers, among others close to her. "Death is still not my favorite subject, but I get better about it as I do the show, which is part of the reason I wanted to do it."

Delicately spearing a curly French fry, she continues, laughing, "I'm also constantly being asked to funerals now. You know how sometimes you can't get a date? Me, I can get thousands of them---all to funerals. I'm always getting people coming up to me, asking if I can talk to somebody who has passed. Quite frankly, thought, the biggest, oddest challenge is to shut off the show and wipe the slate when I get home. Although we deal with a heavy subject in as light a way as possible, when you go home, you kind of have to see the lighter side of things and go, 'Look, my life is really good. I'm alive and the people around me are alive!'"

Well, most of the time, anyway. Hewitt says she was confronted head on by decidedly otherworldly problems while residing in a 1927 Spanish style home once owned by the star of such silent-filmed classics as "The Phantom of The Opera" and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"---the man of a thousand faces himself, Lon Chaney (who worked for Universal). "I'd be lying in my bed and hear running footsteps that would end at the foot of my bed," she says. "I would feel cold air on me. One time, my best friend was staying with me and said, 'Why were you being so loud in the kitchen?' And I was like, 'I wasn't even in the house.' And, sure enough, stuff had been moved around in the kitchen. I had James [Van Praagh] and another consultant on the show come a get out the ghost of a man and a woman. The woman had once lived in this house and was not happy I was there. The man was hanging around because he liked me, and thought I was cute. That's my luck with men---I get a ghost."

Hewitt sold what she calls the "really great house," not because of apparitions, but because she wanted to relocate to another Spanish home, redone, of the same vintage. Although now she lives on her own, for years, she had cohabited with her mother Pat, a speech pathologist.

Laughing, she says, "Nothing dramatic happened between my mother and me. We live very close, so I still see her every day. I didn't go to college when I was 18, like most kids, so there's just a point in your life where it's like, 'I have to go out in the world and try to apply what my parents taught me. Being in this business, there is something so normal, and so non-entertainment industry, about living in a house and trying to figure things out for yourself. I wanted to know that if something broke, I could call a number and get it fixed. I wanted to know if I could keep a home. I did most of the house in Pottery Barn, kind of shabby chic-esque---really practical, really pretty without spending millions, when people come over, if they spill something, they don't have to have a heart attack. Also, I think you really have to live in a home before you know what you truly want to do with it. So, at some point, I'll get fancier furniture but for now it's great. I wanted to learn if I could cook for myself, and it turns out I make great shrimp scampi and I love making Dover sole with saffron Chardonnay risotto."

Copper and Bronze French Imported lace halter dress with crystal beaded trim by Mark Zunino.

So life is good, but even a dream girl has her bad days. "I would love to do Julia Roberts and Cate Blanchett type movies," says Hewitt, who nearly made such films as "William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet" and "The Wedding Planner." Although for me to complain at all I should be slapped, because I have done something a few young people have done---worked steadily for 17 years in a business that has allowed me to grow. I'm very, very lucky. A great thing about being in the business for a long time is that I've learned a lot and I know a lot of people, but to some people that means you're not exciting because you've been around a long time. When they're casting things, it's like 'Well, of course, they're always her.' Or they still see you as a sixteen year-old from "Party Of Five," or they think, 'Yeah, she's done one thing really well, but she can do this, that or the other?' They hire the same five girls in their early 20s, and sometimes I'm like, 'Wow, I wish they'd go on a little vacation, so I can go in for that part!' I would have loved to have been in "Napoleon Dynamite," "Elizabethtown," that Reese Witherspoon-Mark Ruffalo movie "Just Like Heaven" or "The Lake House." They're gonna make a movie of [Fight Club's novelist Chuck Palahniuk's novel] "Invisible Monsters" that I wanted to be a part of for a long time. Everybody has a path and mine is in TV."

As to whether her life path entails baring her famously bodacious body for Playboy in hopes of shaking up her sweet and wholesome image, she says, "That [rumor] was something that just kind of came out and someone said 'Oh yeah, she's doing Playboy.' And all of a sudden I started getting these calls, and they were like 'Well, we knew she wasn't going to be the good girl forever.' The truth is, if I were ever to do Playboy, I'd be doing it for me. It's just not who I am to ever do something like that to prove anything to other people. I always prove things to myself. But I don't see Playboy in my future because there's this dorky, old-fashioned part of me that just feels like that should be just mine. Besides, there's also this 'old Hollywood' thing in me that if you watch old movies, it's so much sexier when things are left to the imagination than if you can see everything. All you have to do is show a part of a shoulder, the upper thigh, a flash of the top of someone's cleavage and that's far sexier than seeing what's attached."

Black dress by Junko Yoshioka for Bonaparte-New York; flower ring by Frédéric Missir Tahiti.

But she waxes slightly less philosophical on the subject of Wilmer Valderrama, one of the stars of the Fox sitcom "That '70s Show," who, in March, on Howard Stern's radio show, boasted in jaw-dropping detail about the specifics on his sexual conquests and adventures, naming Hewitt among a roster that also allegedly includes Lindsay Lohan, Mandy Moore and Ashlee Simpson. The Venezuelan-born actor went so far as to rate Hewitt's bedroom performance as an 8 out of 10.

Hewitt, who has previously linked with such names as Joey Lawrence and Carson Daly, says, "I was working when I heard about it because a bunch of people called me about it right away, like, 'Can you believe this?' And I said 'No, not really.' I was friends with him for about a two-week period of my life. We never dated. None of things that he said happened never happened. I've been very cautious about my private life---that's something I feel a lot of responsibility for. I'm not in the scene. I don't get drunk in places. I don't do drugs. I don't get into fights with people. I don't take on other celebrities. I don't have anything bad to say about anybody. So I really kind of feel that people search out ways to say something about me, to make something bad happened. I feel really picked on sometimes, and I hate it. I'm just someone who keeps her head forward and tries to do what she does without having any drama happen around me. I feel like sometimes people seek me out just to try and get under my skin."

Although it sounds like it's safe to say that Vanderrama's comments succeeded in getting under Hewitt's porcelain skin, "Really, truly, my reaction was that I just had a good old fashion case of hurt feelings," she says. "He's a decent guy. I don't have any bad feelings about him. I think that if anybody looked foolish in the situation, he did. Forget me, it's just not nice to talk about any females that he talks about that way. I think he'll probably think twice about doing something like that again. Do I dislike him? No. Do I blame him? No. I think some guys do that---kiss and tell. But for me, it was a situation that never happened, and now it's something we have to talk about in my life. People kind of look at me and they'll be like, 'Hey, hey, hey.' I don't like that." After a beat, she breaks into a laugh, adding, "Quite frankly, on a funny note, if you're gonna talk about me like that, at least give a rating of a 10, not an 8. I mean, please. I mean, it's only two numbers higher. That was silly."

Since one of Hewitt's not really exes mentioned her in the same breath as actress-singer Lindsay Lohan, whose partying, weight fluctuations and family psychodramas have made her catnip for the tabloids, does she feel any kinship for Lohan and other young stars, having been gossiped-about and speculated-about herself?

"Do I feel sorry for them? No. Do I think it's unfair? Yes. It's unfair that we live in a place where the downfall of an 18 year-old is treated with as much attention as the rise of someone else. But I knew at that age---and to be in this business, you have to know---that if you're a superstar in a bar, you're not suppose to be in there until you're 21 because there's going to be paparazzi outside that bar. You have to know that pictures of you eating a hamburger aren't going to sell as well as pictures of you coming our of a bar tipsy at 2 AM. You have to know that if you're going to get into a fight in a bar, someone at their bar is going to call their friend and call a magazine and go, 'Oh, my God, I just saw the coolest thing!' We live in a time where we want to raise people up, and then take pictures of them falling. That's unfortunate for humanity, nor just entertainment, because it's just the wrong thing to do. But I do think that there are a certain amount of young people out there---not necessarily specific people---who are just not thinking about the fact that of course they're going to take a picture of you doing this or that. So just don't do it. Or, if you want to live your life that way, and you don't want them to see it, do it at home. Have a party with your friends at a hotel somewhere, and don't leave the grounds. Don't walk out of a club at two o'clock in the morning and expect the paparazzi not to take a photo. Not that the stuff they do is wrong. You should live your life. But live your life knowing that that's going to happen, and if it happens, don't come out then say, 'I can't believe they did that to me.'"

Black Italian net and silver beaded cocktail dress by Mark Zunino; 30 caret necklace with pear shaped diamond clusters by Martin Katz, Ltd.; dress-black stiletto pumps with beading by Sergio Rossi.

Regarding Lohan, who, as Hewitt did, is attempting to grown up on screen in movies, Hewitt says, "The thing I can say about the Lindsay Lohan situation is that I have a lot of respect for her in the way that she's handled herself. They took pictures of her doing some unfortunate things. She's been talked about in every way, shape and form that a person can be talked about but she's very honest about who she is and who she wants to be and honest about the fact that a night of partying is fun for her. Whether it's about losing weight, gaining weight, whatever it is, she's very up front about that, like this is who I am, this is who I want to be, I like the way I look. You have to have respect for that. Lindsay Lohan is one person who has handled it extremely well. I didn't have that kind of stuff when I was eighteen. I can't imagine what that kind of onslaught of press and media would be. I don't think that she's somebody who acts surprised that they're there to take a photo of her when she walks out of someplace. It's the ones who do act surprised or act like they don't know that it's happening that I kind of wonder about. I'm like, 'How can you not know? Everybody knows that.'"

Lindsay Lohan

Hewitt is similarly direct on the subject of whether her own squeaky-clean public image mirrors her private life. "If they are things about my private life that I don't want people to see, I just don't do them in public," she says. "That's a pretty easy way to lead your life. If you don't want your neighbors to see you doing something, don't do it outside you're house. If you're okay with it, you have to know in this town that if you're anybody that somebody cares about, if you've been in one of those magazines once, you're probably going to be in one of them again. Quite frankly, if there weren't these magazines, and we weren't in them, a lot of agents and managers would be taking a whole lot of meetings with actors who would be going, 'What's wrong with my career?' Why doesn't anybody care about me? Why am I not in these magazines? Why don't they want to take a picture of me? Why is this studio executive not seeing me in enough magazines and giving me a movie role?' Part of what the paparazzi and the magazines do helps the machine run. People will just go see movies just because that person is their favorite to read about in a magazine. They may know nothing about their acting. So there is a part of it that's needed just to make the business run."

After a hearty lunch, Hewitt needs to attend to details regarding "ANGRY LITTLE GIRLS," an animated series she calls "the female "South Park"," a little edgy and raunchy," which she is lending her voice to, as well as co-producing. And during occasional breaks from filming episodes of "GHOST WHISPERER," she continues to cook up plans for other projects, including starring in a real-life Texas mother who worked in a brothel in a movie she describes as "To Die For" meets "Erin Brockovich" meets "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." The project is titled "She Has Brains, a Body and the Ability to Make Men Love Her." With a name like that, it could be the likeable, fetching and canny actress' life story.